What's the news?
Minister for Transport, Shane Ross, TD, has said that he intends to introduce a sliding scale of penalty points for speeding, depending on how far over the speed limit a driver is travelling when caught. Minister Ross, speaking to The Irish Times, said that he favours an increase from the current level of three points for any breach of the speed limit (including an €80 fine) to "four, six, eight or more points, depending on how fast they are going, and I wouldn't rule out disqualification on a first offence, for really extreme cases."
Mr Ross said that Department officials were currently working on the system, and deciding on whether extra points should be handed out for 10km/h or 20km/h levels and that he intends to bring forward legislation later this year.
"The idea of speeding being the next point of attack in terms of road safety is mine. It is in response to figures in relation to speeding that we have got from the Road Safety Authority and other agencies," he said.
That said, Mr Ross did concede that speeding was not, in general terms, as dangerous as drink-driving, which has been the primary road safety focus for some time now. In fact, despite more than half-a-million points handed out for speeding (that's the 2016 figure, we await the 2017 one) last year was the safest on Irish roads since records began in 1959. To be fair, that's safe in a very relative term - 158 people still lost their lives in road traffic collisions in 2017, but that represents a significant decrease from 2016's 185 deaths, and makes 2017 the safest year we've ever had on our roads. It's also a big step towards the Government's stated goal of reducing annual road deaths to under 124 a year.
Anything else?
Mr Ross has also said this week that district court judges should be given official guidelines for how to apply sentencing and penalties for road traffic offences, saying that "they take too much discretion" especially in cases of drink-driving offences. It has been mooted that combining all the various road traffic offences into one complete act (they are currently covered under several separate acts) could help in this instance, as the ways in which some offences can be prosecuted are inconsistent.